Chestnut's Multimedia Mania

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***************** TOUR OF THE CONTROL PANEL ***************** THIS MANUAL WILL NOW TAKE YOU ON A TOUR OF THE OPTIONS ON THE CONTROL PANEL, INCLUDING GENERAL NOTES ABOUT THE MULTIMEDIA WORKSHOP AS THEY RELATE TO THE DISCUSSION. STOP In the upper left corner is a stop sign. This is how you quit The Multimedia Workshop. You do not need to save your picture file to disk first, because it is automatically saved every time a new element is added to a picture. SEE SEE blanks the screen and then redraws the current picture from scratch, giving you true WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) including any sound effects, delays or animation you have incorporated. This is necessary after some operations because they temporarily destroy the picture. For instance, when placing text on a non-black background, the area under the text will turn to black. To see the picture the way it will actually appear to the end user, select SEE. This option also gives you the chance to study your picture without actually selecting a drawing operation. The picture remains on the screen until [Enter] or the left mouse button is pressed. SEE will ignore sound effects, delays and Wait For User when BLOW OFF DELAYS is selected (from DOOR on control panel). If FASTMODE is turned on (from the DOOR option), sometimes it leaves the control panel on the screen when you want the picture. Select SEE to renew the picture. ERASE ERASE is represented by a blank rectangle. To erase a section of the picture, select this option, then place the dotted rectangle around the area you want to erase. To move the rectangle use the arrow keys or the mouse. To change the size or shape of the rectangle, move the mouse while the right mouse button is held down, or click the spacebar to toggle SIZE MODE and then use the arrow or number keys. Press the spacebar again when you wish to return to MOVE MODE. Once the dotted rectangle surrounds the area to be erased, press [Enter] or click the left mouse button, and the area will disappear, leaving background color, usually black. COPY Just like ERASE, you start by placing a dotted rectangle around an area on the screen. Then when you press [Enter] or click the left mouse button, a copy of the area is movable by the mouse or arrow/number keys until you press [Enter] or click the left button again. The entire area will be copied including any background within the original dotted rectangle. MOVE MOVE is just like COPY, but the original area is deleted, leaving background color, generally black. You can, of course, then fill in the deleted area with some other color or object. BUILD Here we have a very special option, with which you can make a presentation, like a slide show, out of several pictures. To use BUILD, first create a series of pictures files, and decide on an order in which you want them presented. Then select BUILD. BUILD makes a file on the disk called MSHOW.CFG which contains a sort of table of contents used internally by the MSHOW.EXE program. MSHOW.EXE is the presentation program which you distribute along with your finished pictures to display them. So, MSHOW.CFG is the file MSHOW.EXE uses to know what to display. When selected, this option looks for a MSHOW.CFG file on the disk (in the same sub-directory as The Multimedia Workshop). If found, it displays the contents of MSHOW.CFG, but if there is no MSHOW.CFG file it displays an empty list. You can edit the list, or delete MSHOW.CFG (from DOS) and create a new one. (Note: As supplied with The Multimedia Workshop, MSHOW.CFG is already set up for the demo, but when you create your own presentation this version of MSHOW.CFG will be overwritten.) This list is simply the filenames of the picture files in the order they will be presented. For instance, let's say you have created a three-picture show about adjusting a camera. The first picture, called METER.1 shows reading the light meter. The second picture, called CAMERA.1 shows changing the shutter speed, and the third, which shows turning the f-setting, is called CAMERA.2. In the BUILD list, you would type: 1 : METER.1 2 : CAMERA.1 3 : CAMERA.2 Do not use drive and path designations. Remember, you don't know which disk drive or sub-directory an end user may copy your presentation into, so The Multimedia Workshop is carefully designed to avoid drive and path designation and simply use the 'current' drive and path. So obviously, MSHOW.EXE, MSHOW.CFG and your picture files must all be on the same disk or in the same sub-directory to work. This matters when you create a presentation, but when it is distributed, all your files naturally will be on the same disk(s) and will run just fine from disk(s) or from any sub-directory they are copied into. The list scrolls automatically and has room for 180 pictures, but if your presentation is to be distributed on a single floppy disk, the most pictures that a floppy will hold is 108 (approximately, depending on whether you have start up batch files, etc). If you have a larger presentation, you'll have to do some batch file stuff, or provide it on more than one floppy. When done, press the [Esc] key and the new MSHOW.CFG file is written to the disk. Next, you will be asked whether you want to preview the presentation. Answer [Y] to test it. What you see is exactly the same as the end user will see. If the presentation stops, and states that a picture file is missing, it is probably misspelled. Select BUILD and edit your list. FREEHAND DRAWING In the second row of the control panel, in the left corner is a squiggle representing freehand drawing. If using a mouse, hold the left mouse button to draw and release it to move the cursor to another location. Click the right mouse button when done. You have an option to "Accept" or reject your freehand drawing. If you click the left button, your freehand drawing will be saved to disk. If you click the right button, it will be discarded, and the picture will be redrawn without it. If using the keyboard, click the spacebar to start drawing. The cursor will leave a trail wherever you move it until you click the spacebar again. Press [Esc] when done. At this point, you can "Accept" or reject your freehand drawing. If you answer [N] the freehand drawing will not be written to disk, and the picture will be repaired without it. If you do a considerable amount of freehand drawing, the computer's memory fills up and you will be momentarily interrupted as it is written to the disk. Freehand drawing is expensive in disk space, and should therefore be kept to a minimum in large presentations. Freehand drawing is difficult to do with a mouse. Slower, but more accurate keyboard control might be a good idea. You can also accomplish the same results more slowly, but with greater accuracy by using the mouse with the LINE drawing option. LINE Use this option to draw straight lines. If using a mouse, click the left button to start a line, then click the left mouse button again to 'set' the line, or click the right button to cancel the line. When done with LINE, click the right mouse button again. If using the keyboard, use the [Enter] key to simulate the left mouse button and the [Esc] key to simulate the right mouse button. When using the mouse or the keyboard, it might be desirable to float a partially completed line to a new location. You can toggle FLOAT mode by clicking the spacebar. Then click the spacebar again to return to STANDARD mode. This can lead to confusion. If a line misbehaves, try clicking the spacebar to toggle to STANDARD mode. When a diagonal line becomes quite large, it may turn into a dotted line until set. This has no effect on the finished product. It is a feature designed to speed up the line drawing mode on slower computers. Normally the coordinate display in the lower left corner reflects the starting point of the line, but when size mode is toggled with the right mouse button or the spacebar, the coordinate display shows the dimensions of the line. RECTANGLE Using the mouse, hold down the right mouse button to change the size or shape of a rectangle, then click the left button when done. SIZE mode can also be toggled with the spacebar. Using the keyboard, click the spacebar to toggle SIZE mode to change the size or shape of a rectangle, then click it again to return to MOVE mode. Click [Enter] when done. When size mode is toggled (with the spacebar or the right mouse button) the coordinate display in the lower left corner will reflect the dimensions of the rectangle. When not in size mode, the coordinates indicate the upper left corner unless you have inverted the rectangle. CIRCLE Circles are drawn in the same manner as rectangles, but you can't change the shape of a circle, only it's size. Size is affected by vertical movements of the mouse, or the up and down keys, but not affected by horizontal movement. You can use the spacebar to toggle between SIZE and MOVE mode. In some graphics modes, circles are limited in maximum size. ELLIPSE Ellipses are drawn in the same manner as rectangles. In some cases, ellipses can be made more 'round' than circles, such as in a presentation made to display on a laptop computer with a compressed CGA screen, or when drawing in a graphics mode not designed for the computer it will eventually be displayed on. The ELLIPSE option can also be used to draw arcs. This modification is easily made on the fly with the ELLIPSE TYPE option within the DOOR option on the control panel. Ellipses also have a size limit which cannot be exceeded in some graphics modes. FILL An area can be filled with the current pattern and color, if the area is entirely bounded by the current color. In other words, if you have selected the polka-dot pattern from the pattern choices near the middle of the third row of the control panel, you can fill a red circle with red polka-dots. The boundary must be complete, even one pixel missing from a boundary will cause the pattern to leak out and fill the screen. FILL asks whether you want to "Accept" a fill before it is written to disk. If you answer [N] then the picture will be repaired to it's former state. FILL works a bit differently in VGA-lo 256-color video mode. In this mode, FILL will only fill an area if it's existing color is black. And in 256-color, it doesn't matter what the border color is, it doesn't have to be the same color as the current drawing color. Filling in 256-color mode must be done from near the top of rectangular areas, and sometimes must be selected several times to fill an entire irregular shaped area. If creating a presentation in Universal Mode, use fills sparingly, or check your work on several computers with different graphics displays. They don't all handle fills in the exact same way because of the varying number of colors allowed by the graphics modes. UNDO Use this option to get rid of mistakes. Each time it is selected it deletes the last line from the picture file on disk and redraws the picture. You can use UNDO as often as you like eliminating a step at a time from your picture. Because of the nature of ASCII-VECTOR-GRAPHICS, you may need to select UNDO several times in a row to get rid of a mistake, since some commands in the picture file are invisible or require several lines. After selecting UNDO, select SEE if you want to see what was deleted. TEXT When selected, TEXT offers two options: REGULAR TEXT This is a simple word processing sub-program built into The Multimedia Workshop. When selected, a dotted rectangle will appear on the screen. Use the spacebar to toggle SIZE mode, or while pressing the right mouse button, change the size and shape of this rectangle to form a border around the area in which you want to type text. When satisfied with it's size and location, click the left mouse button or press [Enter] to start typing text. You can type normally, and text will automatically wrap (carriage return) when you reach the right side of the text area you have selected. You can use [Bksp] key to delete text. When done, press [Enter] or click the left mouse button. Text will use the currently selected typeface, font dimensions, and color. If you prefer right justification, use the DOOR option to set Right Justification to ON. (Right justification is approximate in all but the BITMAP typeface.) There are no other controls within the REGULAR TEXT option. For fancier word processing (you know, spelling checks, overtype mode, block moves, paragraph reformat, and all those other fancy things word processors do), you can prepare your text first, then use the IMPORT TEXT option, or you can edit text directly in the picture file with any program that works in normal ASCII mode. More about that later. Making columns in The Multimedia Workshop is easy. For two columns, first make a dotted rectangle only on the left half of your picture, fill it with text, then make another rectangle on the right side and fill it with more text. TITLE It seems like 90% of the time that you enter text into a picture, you wish you could automatically center the text as a title. The Multimedia Workshop has a provision for just that! To place a title on the picture, select the font and color you desire then select TITLE from the control panel. Move the arrow on the screen until it is at the location around which you want to center your text. Click [Enter] or the left mouse button. Then type your line of text. When you click [Enter] or the mouse button again, the title will be completed and written to disk. Note: If you want to center the title in the picture, you can use the coordinate display. The horizontal middle of most screens is 320 pixels. In Hercules mode it is 360 and in CGA-LO and VGA-LO it is 160. PATTERN Use this option to select a pattern for FILLS. Point to the desired pattern then click the left mouse button or press [Enter]. Note: There are only two pattern choices in VGA-LO mode. PIXEL EDIT This is useful for fine tuning your pictures. When selected, a dotted rectangle appears on the screen. You cannot change the size of this rectangle. Move it to the area desired and click [Enter] or the left mouse button. The selected area will be very enlarged, filling the whole screen. You can change any of the individual pixels to the current color by pointing to it and clicking the left mouse button or by pressing [Enter]. You can toggle ALWAYS CHANGE option by clicking the spacebar or by holding the left mouse button down. Then every pixel pointed to will change to the current color. When done with PIXEL EDITING, press [Esc] or click the right mouse button. To change pixels to a different color, select the desired color and then reselect PIXEL EDIT. You can add some very artistic effects such as fading colors and shading by careful use of PIXEL EDITING. Pixel editing requires lots of disk space and development time, so its use should be limited in large presentations. SPRAY PAINT This is another disk-space intensive operation, but can be used to create very nice effects of shading and fading. It works well with the mouse, but tends to be tricky when used with the keyboard. You can slow it down (or speed it up) and change the width of the spray pattern from within the DOOR option. It is similar to real-life spray painting in the currently selected color. To paint, hold down the left mouse button, or click [Enter] or toggle SPRAY mode with the spacebar. To quit, click the right mouse button or [Esc]. FILE There are three options within this option. SWITCH TO ANOTHER FILE SWITCH TO ANOTHER FILE is the most common, used when you want to work on another picture file. If you choose to resume on a previously started picture in a graphics mode different than current one, the computer will try to switch automatically. If you switch to a picture in a graphics mode not directly supported by your computer, it will attempt a translation. ADD ANOTHER PICTURE This is very important to clip-art or librarying, in which you can gather a collection of pre-made pictures, then integrate them into your current picture, thereby saving lots of work. Generally the best way to add clip art is to start with an empty or nearly empty picture, then ADD ANOTHER PICTURE, then select MOVE to move your clip-art picture to where you want it in the main picture. For instance, if you are doing a tutorial about cattle, you might start by creating three or four different pictures of cattle. Then for your main pictures, you start by ADDING one or two of your cow pictures, moving them around a little bit, then drawing some trees and milking machines, or whatever, into the picture...and voila, you're done! Unique to The Multimedia Workshop are clip-sounds, which work exactly the same as clip art! Because of the unique clean and compact nature of ASCII-VECTOR-GRAPHICS, clip-art from other programs will not work with The Multimedia Workshop. Clip art generated by The Multimedia Workshop in one video mode may or may not work if ADDed into a picture created in another video mode. For instance, if you have created a picture in 256-color VGA-LO, and try to ADD it to a picture in 16-color UNIVERSAL MODE, your guess is as good as mine as to what will happen to your presentation! TEMPORARILY LAYER A PICTURE This is useful when you are creating precise pictures or animations, where to avoid jerky movement, the objects must move in a carefully controlled path. You can make a special picture file which contains a template, or lines, which help in aligning the elements of the main picture. The layered-on picture will not show in the finished product. Selecting SEE will eliminate the layered-on image. REPORT ON .PCX FILE .PCX files (the most common type of bitmapped picture files) are not all the same. As you might imagine, you cannot use a 256-color VGA .PCX file in a 2-color CGA presentation. If you have a .PCX file and want to know what video mode is required to display it, select this menu option to find out. HOOK A .PCX FILE This is the way to bring clip-art or pre-created pictures into your presentations. Type the name of a .PCX file that you want to 'hook' into your picture. If the file you have typed is not on the disk or misspelled, nothing happens. If the .PCX file is designed for another video mode, you'll be shown a message suggesting the proper video mode to use. If everything is correct, the picture appears on your screen. Of course, you can then draw on it, change it, anything you wish. If you try to hook a .PCX file, but get a message that it was created for a different video mode, the best bet is to make a picture file in the correct video mode, then add the .PCX file to it. But if you can't or don't want to switch to a different video mode, I invite you to experiment. You are offered the option of trying to use your mis-matched .PCX file anyway. Sometimes it will work, sometimes not. When it doesn't the computer may crash. Simply reboot, use a back-up copy of your picture file, and try something else. Many .PCX clip-art files are not full screen size. Most will work just fine with The Multimedia Workshop. Some are oversize and they, too will work, but you may get only the upper left corner of the picture. Some .PCX files are just too different and will not work! Many .PCX files contain new color information and modify the standard colors of The Multimedia Workshop. We have made allowances so that your .PCX files will look right in the finished product. But because you still need to see the control panel and other program functions, once a .PCX file messes with the colors, we switch back and forth between standard colors and the .PCX's chosen colors. So when you see crazy color changes, pay no attention, this is how it's done! You see, in Universal Mode, there are only 16 colors available, but their order can be switched around. In EGA-HI mode, there are 16 colors available at any one time, but any one of these colors can be chosen from a group of 64 total colors. In 256-color mode, each of the 256 colors can have from 0 to 63 portions each of (negative) red, green or blue! So we let the .PCX files have their way. Still, sometimes, the .PCX steals the mouse pointer color and changes it too! You can grab it back by selecting FORCE POINTER TO WHITE in DOOR on the control panel. There is also an option for changing any of the on-screen colors in the DOOR option of the control panel. NOTE: Once the color palette is changed, the little current color box in the lower right corner of the control panel may show the wrong colors. Now suppose you want to use a picture image that is not in .PCX format. Perhaps you have a .GIF file or a .PCC or .ART or something else. These can be used too, but what you have to do is find one of the many TSR programs that come with many paint programs or available as shareware which capture a screen image and turn it into a .PCX file. Then you can use it in The Multimedia Workshop. ANOTHER NOTE: You cannot create a Universal Mode presentation with .PCX files and have it work on all graphics cards. If you create on an EGA or VGA system, a .PCX file in Universal mode will work on all other EGA and VGA systems, but usually not on CGA or Hercules. This is because .PCX files are loaded into graphics memory in different ways in different graphics modes, or more specifically on different graphics cards. LINE THICKNESS At the very left of the fourth row is a picture of two horizontal lines, one thin and one thick one. When you point and click in this box, a menu pops up giving you a choice of thick or thin solid, dotted or dashed lines for use in LINE, RECTANGLE, FREEHAND, CIRCLE and ELLIPSE. Dotted and dashed lines have no effect in CIRCLE and ELLIPSE. SOUND There are several choices within this option. Most of these choices are built-in libraried sounds. When selected, they will play, then you will be asked whether you want to "Accept" them. If you choose [N], or click the right mouse button, the picture file will remain unchanged. If you do accept the sound effect, it will be incorporated into the picture. Some of the sound effects ask for a time specification. They will run for as many milliseconds as you indicate. 1000 milliseconds = 1 second. There is a limit of 60000 milliseconds (one minute) but if you want a longer sound, select the same sound many times in a row. You can leave the music menu by choosing RETURN TO MAIN MENU. CUSTOM Use this option on the SOUND menu to create your own sound effects. All sounds consist of a tone expressed in Hertz, or cycles per second, and a duration. Silence is 0 Hertz. By careful design of sounds, you can make some interesting effects. MUSIC This is the most interesting option within the SOUND menu, where you can actually copy or compose your own songs. To use, select timing by pointing to a note on the bottom staff, and click [Enter] or the left mouse button. Then select a tone by pointing to a note on the upper staff. You can also incorporate rests by pointing to them on the lower staff and clicking. To keep the music lively, there are three types of "Attacks" available, Regular, Slur and Staccato. Select these by pointing and clicking. In the left corner of the music menu is an area which says, "CLICK HERE FOR MENU." This music sub-menu allows you to preview, save or dispose of a melody. It is also the way to return to the control panel. You can also return to the control panel by pressing [Esc] or the right mouse button. Be careful not to press [Esc] or the right button before you intend to! TIME This is the key to animation and is also useful for situations in which you wish to show part of a picture, allow the user to absorb the information, then show more. Delay asks for an amount of time in milliseconds. 1000 milliseconds is one second. The maximum delay is 60000 milliseconds, or one minute. If you prefer a longer delay than one minute, select TIME several times in a row. When you want to use many delays, all of the same length, you can preset the amount of delay time. select CHANGE PRESET and type a number of milliseconds. Then, when TIME is selected, a delay is immediately written into the file, saving you keystrokes. NOTE: If you select BLOW OFF DELAYS from within the DOOR option on the control panel, DELAYs, WAIT FOR USER, and SOUNDS will be skipped when using The Multimedia Workshop, but they will still be in effect when using MSHOW.EXE. This is a tricky bit of business, because if you forget that BLOW OFF DELAYS is active, you can make pictures which won't behave as expected when distributed as a finished product. ZOOM This option lets you change the size of an object or area in your picture. Move and size the dotted rectangle to enclose an area to zoom. Click [Enter] or the left mouse button. Then change the size of the dotted rectangle to the new size you would like the area to become and then click [Enter] or the left mouse button again. Zoom takes very little disk space in your picture file, but runs slow, especially on older XT-class machines. Therefore, for best performance, keep the zoomed area as small as possible. IMPORT TEXT Even though there is a simple word processor built into The Multimedia Workshop, you might have already composed text in a different program, or might prefer to use a full-blown word processor to make text, then import it into your picture. There are two modes available from within IMPORT TEXT: FLOWED IMPORT: This is an interesting automated feature. You will be asked to name an ASCII file containing the text you want to incorporate into your picture(s). Then you must indicate the upper left corner of the area the text will be allowed to fill by moving the cursor arrow and pressing [Enter] or clicking the left mouse button. The program then reads the text file, and places as much of the text as will fit in the picture, starting at the area you have indicated. No text will occur left of the area you indicated. Text will stop before anything drawn to the right, and continue down to the next line. It is right justified to flow around obstacles! Text will stop at the bottom of the screen, or when an obstacle is encountered at the bottom of the area. If there is more text than will fit in the area, the rest is saved in a temporary disk file. When you next select FLOWED IMPORT, indicating another area in the same picture, or in another picture, the text continues to flow from where you left off. Until you use up all the text in the text file, you will not be asked to name any other text files, it automatically knows when you haven't used it all up. You can take advantage of FLOWED IMPORT's intelligence by drawing temporary lines (or use LAYER from within the FILE option) to restrict the area in which you will allow text. FLOWED IMPORT mode uses the currently selected typeface, font size and color. These settings can optionally be changed from one flow to the next even with the same ASCII file. Pure standard ASCII text is required. Almost all word processing programs do this, although with some you may have to take a careful look at your owner's to figure out how it's done. There should be no border or blank spaces to the left of the text in the ASCII file, except paragraph indentations. Paragraph indentations are respected, but completely blank lines are skipped. Formatting text into columns is easy. For two columns, you can place a vertical line in the middle of your picture. Flow text into the left side, and then flow more into the right side. BLOCK IMPORT: This option will transfer text from an ASCII file verbatim, except it will use the currently selected typeface and font size. You must first prepare your text. It must be in standard ASCII format. Almost all word processors can make ASCII files (plain text) but many use non-ASCII formats to include coding for fonts, special right justification and other special things. Each word processor handles ASCII differently, so you'll have to read your word processing program's documentation to use ASCII format. There is a good shareware word processor that uses normal ASCII as it's own standard format. It is called Galaxy-Lite. If your text file contains more text than would fit in a single picture, you must break it up into several smaller disk files, each containing the text for one picture. Each of these files must have the text formatted into a block which will fit on the screen. You can't have lines of text 75 columns wide, to fit in a space half as wide as a whole picture, for example. Each block must contain no more than the number of lines a picture can contain. How many columns and lines are allowable? There is no easy answer, because different graphic modes and different fonts require different amounts of text space. Generally, using the smallest BITMAP font, the graphics modes with 640 pixels horizontally - CGA-HIGH, EGA, Hercules and VGA, can handle lines of text up to 76 characters wide. In the case of 200 vertical pixels, such as CGA-HI, and UNIVERSAL MODE, you can fit as many as 18 lines of text when using the smallest font. To get your text block sizes to fit really well, you'll have to experiment a bit. To use IMPORT TEXT, you will be asked to name a file. This is the file containing ASCII text to import. Then a dotted rectangle will appear on your picture representing the amount of area your text will require. Move the rectangle to the proper location, then click [Enter] or the left mouse button. If IMPORT TEXT overwrites the background of a picture, simply select SEE to see the finished product. WAIT FOR USER Here's a useful option which can also cause a lot of trouble! When selected, WAIT FOR USER freezes all action until the end user presses any key. It is most often used to present an idea within a picture and then present more information after the user has had a moment to absorb the first bit. For instance, you can present an idea, add a WAIT FOR USER, ERASE a portion or all of the screen, then write more information. You must put a notice into your picture to "Press any key to continue" or the end user may think the computer has broken. This can also fool you, because if you forget you have installed a WAIT FOR USER into a picture, you might think your own computer has broken anytime you select SEE or PIXEL EDIT or any operation which redraws the screen. Also note that if FASTMODE or BLOW OFF DELAYS are turned on, WAIT FOR USER is rendered inactive while you are creating your pictures, but will be QUITE (!) effective in the finished product. DOOR This is the DOOR through which you go to control the settings of The Multimedia Workshop. Some of these are quite important to everyday operation of the program, but they are very easy to adjust. The options within the DOOR option are: ELLIPSE TYPE STATUS REPORT SPRAYS SET DELAYS JUSTIFY TEXT COORDINATE DISPLAY BOTTOM HELP BAR TURN SOUND ON/OFF TURN FASTMODE ON/OFF TURN BLOW OFF DELAYS ON/OFF CHANGE PALETTE COLORS FORCE POINTER TO WHITE SAVE SETTINGS TO DISK RETURN TO CONTROL PANEL ELLIPSE TYPE In addition to full 360 degree ellipses, you can draw the top, bottom, left or right halves of an ellipse. You can also choose custom ellipse parameters. Simply point to the portion of an ellipse you want and click [Enter] or the left mouse button. If you choose CUSTOM, you will be taken to a sub-menu with additional instructions. STATUS REPORT Selecting this option will display a report of all the current settings of The Multimedia Workshop. SPRAYS Use this to control how the SPRAY PAINT option works. You can control the density (speed) of paint flow, and you can control the width of the pattern. If you are drawing from the keyboard, the SPRAY PAINT option tends to run too fast. Readjust to suit your tastes with this option. SET DELAYS In it's default state, every time you select TIME from the control panel, you are asked to type a number in milliseconds. You can predetermine the number with this option, saving yourself keystrokes if you are using the TIME option frequently. Once you have pre-selected an amount of time, then when TIME is chosen from the control panel, the delay is immediately written to the picture file. To restore the question about milliseconds, select DOOR again, then select SET DELAYS and answer [N]. JUSTIFY TEXT Set JUSTIFY TEXT to on and you'll have an aligned right hand edge in your text blocks. With JUSTIFY TEXT off, you'll have standard ragged right-hand edges. In all but the BITMAP font, right justification is approximate within a couple of pixels width. COORDINATE DISPLAY The COORDINATE DISPLAY is the little box in the lower left corner containing two numbers. The first is the horizontal position of the current drawing object in pixels. O is the left edge of the screen, and most graphics modes end at 639 on the right edge. The second number is the vertical, with 0 marking the top and the largest number being the bottom of the screen. In CGA and UNIVERSAL modes, the bottom is 199, in Hercules it is 347, in EGA-HI it's 349 and in VGA it is 479. You can turn this display off, and thereby gain drawing access to the lower left corner of the screen. The coordinate display offers more information than you might at first realize. While sizing a dotted rectangle to place text on a picture, the display changes to show the approximate dimensions of the rectangle in characters and lines in the currently selected font. In many other drawing options, when sizing the rectangle, the coordinate display changes to tell you the dimensions of the rectangle in pixels. BOTTOM HELP BAR In most graphic modes (not CGA-LO 4-color) a rectangle containing a single line of help information is often at the Bottom of the screen. This can be turned off if you don't require the help, and therefore you can gain drawing access to the whole screen. However, if you are going to use MSHOW.EXE to display your pictures, the MSHOW menu covers the same area and shouldn't be drawn because it will be hidden. TURN SOUND ON / OFF There are two versions of sound effects. There are the ones you can add to a picture and there are another set that are built into the program to help you identify when you have completed steps, taken correct or incorrect actions, etc. These program sounds may not always be desirable and can be turned off by merely selecting this item on the DOOR menu. Just select this item to turn the program sounds back on. TURN FASTMODE ON / OFF This feature speeds up the creation of large picture files and those involving sound effects or animation. When turned on, this feature causes the picture to be saved in memory in a bitmap format when the control panel is put on the screen, and redrawn from memory rather from the disk when an item is selected. This means instant access to your picture, rather than having to wait every time you use the control panel. In some situations FASTMODE will occasionally malfunction, leaving the control panel on the screen when you should be looking at your drawing. To remedy the situation, select SEE, then resume your work, or turn FASTMODE off. Fastmode is most effective with large picture files, or those with lots of sounds or animation. TURN "BLOW OFF DELAYS" ON / OFF This feature is similar to FASTMODE, but rather than using any fancy internal bitmapping, it simply ignores SOUND effects, DELAYs and WAIT FOR USER when regenerating the picture. Selecting SEE and other menu choices does not display true WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) because these features are disabled, however BLOW OFF DELAYS has no effect on the finished product as displayed by MSHOW.EXE. BLOW OFF DELAYS works in all graphics modes. If you use WAIT FOR USER, it is very important to remember that it is installed in your presentations if you are using BLOW OFF DELAYS. Otherwise, you may forget to put notices in your pictures to the end users to "press any key to continue." CHANGE PALETTE COLORS This function is only available for Universal Mode, EGA-HI, VGA-HI and VGA-LO video modes. You see: In Universal mode, the computer allows up to 16 colors on the screen at one time, but they may be switched around so that what was white can be yellow, etc. In EGA-HI and VGA-HI, there can be only 16 colors on the screen at one time, but these 16 can be chosen from a group of 64 different colors. In VGA-LO, each of the 256 colors can be composed of 0 to 63 parts of red, blue and green. When this feature is selected your current picture returns to the screen. Point to any area of your picture containing the color you want to change. In the 16-color modes, roll the mouse up or down or use the up and down arrow keys to change the color amongst it's 16 or 64 possibilities. Press [Enter] or click the left mouse button when you come to a color you like. In 256-color mode, you can also click [R], [G] or [B] on your keyboard to add or subtract varying amounts of negative Red, Green or Blue. Sometimes this color selection is important after hooking a .PCX file, since they often change the color palette, and you might want to change some of it back. Color palette changes are immediately written to your picture file on disk. NOTE: Once palette colors are changed, the little current color box in the lower right corner of the control panel may show the wrong color! FORCE POINTER TO WHITE When a .PCX file changes the color used for the mouse pointer and some menu items, you may have trouble seeing what you are doing. You can change the pointer back to white with this option, but it may change the way your .PCX file looks. The color change is immediately written to your picture file on disk. SAVE SETTINGS TO DISK It would be inconvenient to have to redo all these settings every time you start the program, so you can save your currently selected settings to a special disk file. The disk file is called MW.SET. Then, every time The Multimedia Workshop starts, it reads that file and remembers your choices. However you have ELLIPSE TYPE, FONTS, SPRAYS, TIME DELAYS, TEXT JUSTIFICATION, BOTTOM HELP BAR AND COORDINATE DISPLAY STATUS, SOUND EFFECTS, BLOW OFF DELAYS, and FASTMODE, when you save these settings to disk, is how The Multimedia Workshop will remember them next time you start it up. Additionally, it also remembers the current GRID status if you are using a GRID. If you wish to restore all defaults to The Multimedia Workshop, you can simply delete MW.SET from your disk. RETURN TO CONTROL PANEL Obviously, returns you to the control panel (main program menu). Settings are saved in memory but not saved to disk. If you want to maintain your settings for the next time you use The Multimedia Workshop, select SAVE SETTINGS TO DISK, before returning to the control panel. GRID The GRID is a series of evenly spaced white dots which are not part of the finished picture, but which help in aligning parts of a picture. To turn the GRID on, select this option, then you will be asked for a distance between dots. 10 is a typical number. To get rid of the GRID, return to this option and when asked, "TURN GRID ON?," answer negatively with [N] or a click of the right mouse button. The grid is overwritten and easily messed up as you work on a picture, so select SEE to restore the grid as often as necessary. NOTE Select NOTE to put a 'secret' note in your picture file that exists on the disk, but will not show in the picture. This is very useful in a case where you might want to do some ASCII editing to your file. For instance, Lets say you have drawn a carefully made face in your picture, now you want to start drawing a hand. But, you are not sure your first attempt at a hand will come out good, and may have to erase it and do it again. A clean way to do this is as follows: 1. When ready to start the hand, select NOTE from the control panel and type: HAND STARTS HERE. 2. Draw the hand. 3. If you are not satisfied with your first attempt at a hand, use a word processing program (in ASCII mode) or text editor to edit the picture file. Find the place where it says, "HAND STARTS HERE" and delete everything below that note. 4. Try drawing the hand again. FONT You have a choice of typefaces and font sizes used in TEXT, IMPORT TEXT, and TITLE. Simply point to the one you want and click [Enter] or the left mouse button. Then you can use the arrow keys or the move mouse to control the size and shape. Press [Enter] or click the left mouse button when done. Only the first two typefaces are built into MSHOW.EXE, and MW.EXE, the others are stored on disk as separate .CHR files. If you use any typefaces except BITMAP or TRIP, you must make sure a copy of the corresponding .CHR file(s) are copied onto the disk along with your picture files. PAPER Select this option to print a screen to paper. You will be asked to verify that your printer is ready. If you answer yes, the picture will be printed in a nearly correct aspect ratio. In some video modes, the printed picture ends up larger than in others. In VGA-HI, on a regular size printer, some of the right-hand edge of the screen will not be printed to paper. On a wide printer, you should get the whole picture. NOTE: The PAPER option may not work properly with all printers. No matter what type of printer you have, sound effects will not be printed. When a picture is printed, all colors which are not black are printed. In other words, a paper copy will not reflect differences in color except between black and anything else. Actually, as is typical when printing color graphics onto paper, all non-black colors become black, and black is white. Try it, you'll see what I mean. In order to accommodate the widest variety of printers and video modes, the size of the resulting paper copy may vary from one video mode to another. If you want something larger or smaller, if your computer supports them, experiment with different video modes. If you are not getting proper results with PAPER, a good alternative is to use GRAPHICS.COM which comes with MS-DOS. To use it, type GRAPHICS at your DOS prompt before you start MW.EXE or MSHOW.EXE. Then press [Shift] + [Print Screen] when you want a paper copy. COLORS The last item on the control panel is COLORS. Depending on which graphics mode you are using this will have different appearances. Generally, point to the color you want and click [Enter] or the left mouse button. This will become the current color for FREEHAND DRAWING, LINES, RECTANGLES, CIRCLES, ELLIPSES, FILLS, PIXEL EDITING, TEXT, IMPORT TEXT, AND TITLES. In HERCULES, there are only two choices, black or white. In CGA-HI, you have a submenu which allows you to also change the background color*. This has little or no effect on monochrome displays, but has an interesting effect on color displays. As you know, you can only have two colors on the screen at a time in CGA-HI mode, but you can control which color the background is. This information is written to the picture file, and so the background color will change in the finished product as well as during development. Note: On some CGA systems, this affects the foreground color, not the background, but in most cases, it looks good either way! In CGA-LO, you may have up to 4 colors on the screen at one time, which is still quite limiting. In order to make up for this, perhaps, CGA allows you to change the background color, so you can sort of simulate the effect of more colors. This menu has four on-screen color rectangles, surrounding a center rectangle which gives you a menu of background colors from which to choose. In the 16-color modes, simply point and click for the color of your choice. In the 256-color (VGA-LO) mode, simply point and click. Remember, in the EGA and VGA modes, you can choose your on-screen colors from a much larger selection. Select CHANGE COLOR PALETTE from the DOOR option on the control panel. _____________________________________________________________ end of chapter